This might be of interest for your smallest Sage Live and maybe even for the larger one.

Quote:

Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. . For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax..

Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.

The Lout distribution is very easy to compile and maintain, which certainly is not the case of many TeX distributions. The Lout distribution is much smaller (it fits onto a floppy disk) than LaTeX, and doesn't require storing tfm and pk font outlines (since Postscript fonts are used).

On the other hand, LaTeX is much more widely used than Lout (TeX has been around since the late 1970s, Lout only since 1991). It will be easier to find a local TeXpert than a Louter, and there are many more user-contributed packages for LaTeX than for Lout. Many academic journals request (or require) that papers be submitted in LaTeX. Lout uses more memory than TeX, up to 10MB to compile large documents.

Last but not least, Lout comes with very comprehensive and comprehensible documentation. The user's guide contains all you need to know for using Lout effectively - something that is hard to find in the LaTeX world because LaTeX consists of so many different packages (which sometimes don't get along all that well).

A bit of history. Back in the 1970s mainframes offered vi and emacs to edit text and the roff family and Scribe to format text for printing. Many early home computer word processors combined stripped-down versions of Emacs and Scribe. These included Mince and Perfect Writer for CP/M and later Perfect Writer, Final Word, and Borland Sprint for DOS.

TeX originated as a typesetting language. LaTeX is a set of TeX macros that add Scribe-like document creation features to TeX. (The syntax for the added features is very similar to Scribe.) Lout, OTOH, is descended more directly from Scribe, with some features (math. equations) similar to LaTeX.

Anyway, something that fits on a floppy and has a single comprehensive user manual might be appearling to students -- or to creators of light scientific Linux distros;-)

Hi hayden - I dind't knew "Lout" - nice find. Anyway I will stick with LaTeX, Libreoffice, Geany and mg. My main goal is not the size, but it should have some practical value. I think it is better to let Students use LaTeX, than to let them learn an even more "obscure" Typesetting language. Of course if the Prof. uses it, things are different ...

regarding the texlive size - with a halfway decent hardware the use of these sfs is no problem. I would even recommend to use the FULLAPP or TETEX package, because the are comprehensive and beginners shouldn't have problems with missing components.

I went to download the sagelite-serverb1.iso and this is only available from the one source which is a slower download speed. I can download the full version from mydrive quicker than the lite version!

Any chance of putting the lite versions somewhere else as well, e.g. mydrive.ch?

I made those versions as a showcase for several technical possibilities:
1) make a usable sage program with small size (latest sage installs with over 1.5 GB)
2) make a preconfigured multiuser server, so it is easy to setup in a small network (e.g. in a school) which can be accessed through the net with the browser.
3) make it secure on puppy - I guess there are still loopholes, but especially when run as virtual machine under Virtual Box this should give an appropriate testbed ("sandboxed")

Just some notes on the server functionality:
the sage server is run under user "sageadmin". It listens and sends its output on port 8000. To allow multiple users to log in and work at the same time, there are also users 1, 2, 3 .. 29. If you log in with https://IP:8000, sageadmin has to ssh into one of those helper accounts - so it is possible to create "unlimited" user accounts, but only 29 can be logged in at the same time.

To make the logging in possible, there is a set of ssh keys generated at "firstrun". Those keys are stored in the savefile, so they are persistent. (There is the possibility to run the script fix-ssh-keys.sh from command line to generate a new set of keys). The ssh daemon is started at the same time with the sage server, so it is off by default. It can be started with the full path (only): /usr/sbin/sshd

security considerations
It is also possible to ssh into the server, but to do so you will have to change passwords as described in the release notes. Maybe also change the hostname (/etc/hostname). I avoided to have ssh daemon running by default with known passwords and ssh keys included into the iso for security considerations.

During the creation and testing I run into various permission issues with such a "multi-user" setup. e.g. permissions of /tmp, /dev/tty, busybox and other system files. I am glad to say that I checked, and 01micko has most of those sorted out in slacko. I hope those don't creep in again ... Maybe the light version is reduced a bit to aggressively to use it as standard desktop distro. Many of the usual puppy programs are stripped out (for some I removed the menu entries, but they are still there). But it will be possible to apply those techniques to full versions.

I will see, I probably put this into my "VirtualBox- Windows installer", then I will have christmas-break ...

bachai.tex was typed in vietnamese chars but you can compile in LaTeX to see result.
I want to know what happen with "fmtutils". TeXLive did'nt made an latex.fmt -> Can't build anything
This is source file in tar.gz
Cheer

I worked on a version of Sage Live which will automatically install itself in a virtual Machine under windows. This includes the installation of Virtual Box OSE (Gpl2). The virtual machine includes the multi user sage server (sage-lite2.ova), so this should make the setup of a small sage server in a windows-LAN easy.

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